Thursday, April 26, 2012

I've just received some jaw-dropping Matrix-like debug screenshots from Brigade developer Jeroen van Schijndel, showing a glimpse of an in-development ultra-efficient BVH acceleration structure. The screenshots visualize the bounding volumes (nested axis-aligned bounding boxes against which rays are tested before they are tested for intersection with the primitives that are contained in these AABBs) in the "Streets of Asia" scene that was shown in previousposts. Brigade also gained a dazzling 30% increase in performance yesterday.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Urban Sprawl 2 from Stonemason is a very detailed 3d city model, so it was a no-brainer to test this scene with Brigade. Since the scene rendered much more smoothly than expected, I also threw in a high poly Transformer model to make it a bit more challenging (the materials on the Transformer model still need some tweaking). Surprisingly, Brigade doesn't break a sweat. All the eye candy inherent to path tracing is present: glossy and specular reflection, refraction, global illumination with diffuse color bleeding, ambient occlusion (under the cars) and depth of field. With Brigade performing so great, there's a lot of headroom left for dynamic objects like cars and animated characters (which will be shown in another post). For example, a photorealistic GTA or real-time photorealistic urban planning with dynamic day-night cycle are some of the possibilities.

A plethora of screenshots (some of them have already been shown in previous posts) for thy viewing pleasure:

This guy has invented a new algorithm for tracing incoherent rays that doesn't need an acceleration structure at all, which means no time consuming updates or rebuilds of the acceleration structure. This would also immediately solve the problem of ray tracing huge dynamic scenes. The research was inspired by a recent algorithm proposed by Keller and Wachter (toxie on ompf), which was in turn inspired by a method described in a patent of Caustic Graphics iirc.

Excerpt of the abstract:

We present a new ray traversal method based on this principle, which efﬁciently handles incoherent rays, and takes advantage of the SSE and AVX instruction sets of the CPU. Our algorithm offers notable performance improvements over similar existing solutions, and it is competitive with powerful static ray tracers

Monday, April 23, 2012

I've upgraded the Streets of asia scene with some normal mapping to add an extra layer of realism. The scene truly comes alive now and is downright gorgeous. It's a joy to fly through the environment and see the real-time photorealistic lighting infuse every object with spirit. The screenshots below rendered instantly, thanks to a healthy speed bump in Brigade's code:

About Me

Passionate about real-time path tracing and photoreal rendering with GPU ray tracing. I'm currently leading the scientific visualisation team at the EPFL Blue Brain Project in Geneva. Before that, co-founder and project lead at MI New Zealand, project lead at the University of Auckland NZ, technical project manager on OctaneRender (from pre-v1.0 beta to v2.0), instigator and driving force behind the Brigade real-time path tracing in games project leading the creative and technical R&D vision (Feb 2012 - Oct 2013), photoreal 3D graphics developer and consultant, medical imaging/neuroradiology researcher. My tutorial series on GPU accelerated path tracing (with source code) can be found on GitHub.
For questions, email me at sam.lapere@live.be